Changing Tongues

WE cannot always rely on Huck Finn’s method of telling when we have traveled into a new state or country, by comparing its color with the colors on the map; but it is not impossible to feel a difference in the shade of things when one has passed over a boundary that is linguistic as well as political.

After leaving a comprehensible tongue and beginning to hear a strange one, a traveler may sense a certain darkening of the landscape and the objects around him, as if gray veils were being drawn about his brain, so as to dim even the impressions coming from his eyes. In point of fact he experiences a lessening of mental light, and association causes him to feel it in terms of sight as well as of understanding.

The reverse of this process is more agreeable and no less striking. One who has sojourned among users of a strange tongue may recall an occasion when his native friends (those superior beings drawing infinite might from their ability to pronounce their own language correctly!) proposed speaking English for a few minutes for a change, and he felt a sensation of lifting veils which left him sitting in a brightened landscape talking with a group of queer foreigners. They were not even of the same dimensions as the beings with whom he had often been trying to carry on a conversation, any more than a headland on a sunny day is of the same height as that headland bulking huge in a mist.

A mathematical layman can have few experiences more irritating than being told that a fourth dimension is conceivable. His imagination is tortured by the idea, as that of a character in the ‘movies’might be by the suggestion that it is possible to step out of the canvas. And yet, after some experience in moving from an unknown language into a known one, the least mathematical mind may feel that it understands the kind of change of consciousness which the perception of a new dimension would bring to it. If one visits a foreign city twice, having learned its language in the interval, he may really feel, on his second visit, that the place has taken on another dimension. The houses will look penetrable, instead of like mere, hard surfaces blocking off the streets; the cafés will seem less like backgrounds, and the people more like bodies among which it is possible to move about.

If 'Light! More Light!’ expresses the aspiration which has caused earthdwellers to hope for heaven, we may, perhaps, conceive of an entrance into bliss which shall resemble the lifting of yet more mental veils, the perceiving of another dimension, in short a coming into a country whose language one more perfectly understands. The punishment of those who do not enter into bliss, on the other hand, may be in finding that they do not understand the language of the future life so well as that of the present.

Materialists, too, may base speculations on the experience of changing tongues. If to die is to have one’s consciousness extinguished, and we must all die, why should we not go through the process gradually, and escape a shock which many of us seem to dread? An American, feeling that his ‘little candle' had almost burned out, might forthwith begin a course of travel on a plan such as the following: first, England, where the accent of the people would make the language a little harder to understand than at home, and work a correspondingly slight dimming of the atmosphere; second, France, whose language the traveler might know fairly well, but not so well as his own; third, Italy, with whose tongue, aside from operatic passages, he would probably be still less familiar; fourth, Greece, where he would understand only the few words which have survived from Xenophon’s day. Throughout this journey more and more veils would slip across the mind of the careful old materialist, and it would all occur so gradually that by the time he reached Turkey he would probably find that he had practically died without noticing it.